25th February 2011 Archive

The Turing Collection - the set of offprints of Alan Turing's work collected by his friend Professor Max Newman - has been saved for the nation after the last minute arrival of money from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Bloomberg News has identified six of the energy companies targeted in recent series of “coordinated covert and targeted cyberattacks” and says the victims could face legal liability for choosing not to disclose them to shareholders.

If you’ve seen one BlackBerry, you’ve sort of seen them all: the latest models nearly all talk the same design language of smallish screen and biggish keyboard, the unchanging row of buttons and, generally a chrome frame.

Companies whose small print changes the basis of consumer deals will face investigation by consumer regulator the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), it has said. According to the OFT, one in five consumers had experienced a contract problem in the last year.

MySpace talks are reportedly set to take place between News Corp and around 20 potential suitors next month, as the struggling entertainment portal's parent company looks to sell or spin-off the business it acquired in 2005 for $580m.

Intel was not about to pre-announce all the feeds and speeds of its future Xeon and Itanium processors at the IEEE's International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week. But its chip engineers are just like all the others attending the event. They want to show off the electrical engineering marvels they have created, and they did lift a little curtain on future "Sandy Bridge-EP" and "Westmere-EX" Xeon processors, due later this year.

Aussie customs officers are to get right under the skin of visitors to the Lucky Country with body scanners that will allow them to peruse suspected smugglers' internals without the need for a doctor's expertise.

In a move that melds sneaky with shrewd, Microsoft has added Mozilla's Do Not Track browser header to the submission of its Tracking Protection proposal to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This potentially leaves Google – the third of the three contenders for privacy-enhanced browsing – isolated in a self-regulatory alliance with a gaggle of US ad networks, while Microsoft sidles closer to the kind of solution the regulators are likely to go for.

Mozilla release manager Christian Legnitto confirmed in the early hours of this morning that there will be just one more beta of Firefox 4 before the upcoming but oft-delayed browser hits Release Candidate status.

Microsoft has updated its malware protection technology following the discovery of a bug which might, given a plausible but unlikely set of circumstances, allow a hacker to gain root access to vulnerable systems.

We all know what's going to be so frabjous about cloud computing: it's going to make the damn stuff work. Yes, yes, we have computing systems that work now, but they need that priestly caste made up of Reg readers sitting in front of them, in charge.

Killzone 3's Infiltrators are a class apart. Camouflaging themselves, they mimic their opponents' identity to move unmolested through hostile territory. Then, when the pivotal moment presents itself, they break cover and wreak havoc on an unsuspecting enemy.

Anyone who has been around the IT block a few times will have seen application deployments that didn’t quite match up to expectations. But as people frequently point out, it’s not just about the technology. While nobody sets out to deliver an implementation that displays the same discrepancies as the one it replaces, it remains inordinately difficult to fully respond to the needs of the business, particularly if the business has to change.

Chinese comms kit giant Huawei Technologies, which controversially withdrew from its bid to buy 3Leaf Systems earlier this week, is calling on the US government to investigate claims that it has links to the People's Liberation Army.

It will come as no surprise to the largely libertarian technology industry that big government has done little to advance the interests of Silicon Valley. But you might raise your eyebrows at the degree to which the US government is hurting the very people it tries to help.

If the Chinese government is scaring the world with its hybrid CPU-GPU clusters, what do you think the reaction will be when Chinese supercomputers shun American-made x64 processors and GPU co-processors and start using their own energy-efficient, MIPS-derived, x86-emulating Godson line of 64-bit processors?